> You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'
What if the mindset of producers were to shift? What if people only worked for free on things that they want to work on? Isn't that both more realistic and better for everyone?
They were built in the past as part of nuclear-weapons-oriented industry of the Cold War. Like many things about nuclear, taking away the need to build weapons changes a lot of the economics around them.
This (need for military-grade plutonium) is only part of the benefits of breeder reactors.
They lift most of the dependency towards uranium providers (needing way less of it), and considerably helps tackling the nuclear waste challenge (producing way less of waste, and less hot).
The challenge is technical: obtaining a satisfying industrial (big, predictable, not too expensive...) breeder isn't a solved problem.
My proposal would be to use combined cycle gas turbines to peak renewables until over-installation and storage make that no longer necessary.
Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels burnt in ICEs and for heating with electricity generated using gas will drastically reduce emissions quickly. There is plenty of gas. Much of it is cheap to extract.
The strategic reasons for doing this are that gas turbines will be able to handle the extreme 'duck curves' and other demand volatility we will see when both renewables and electric vehicles are ramped up hard. Those are the two levers which are currently easiest to push on - because individuals can replace vehicles and heating systems, and will do so given smallish financial incentives. And because solar, wind and storage, can be scaled easily without excessive top-down planning or insane capital needs.
If nuclear is to be the solution, we have to quickly commit to it hard as a society. Compared to gas, nuclear will both make electricity more expensive and make swings and volatility in demand or in renewable supply more costly to deal with. It will on the margin discourage EV and electric heating, and discourage other renewables.
Nuclear is good at 'base load', but not much else. This is fine(-ish) if we rapidly switch to almost all nuclear. It works well in a 'Star Trek economy' where governments can act quickly and cheaply and impose choices by offering abundance. If this was the case, it would make sense to call a 50 year decision that nuclear with a modest amount of over-provision will replace almost all generation. (This has succeeded historically only in France, a very centralized economy for a Western democracy, with a high degree of regulation, and where the government has abundant access to capital.)
The real climate/energy economy is not like this. If you want to see an example of rapid change in action, look at the fracking revolution in the United States. Small players who saw opportunities created a whole new set of technologies, techniques and practices. They did this because they could react to incremental incentives. They didn't have to win everywhere at once. They could win field by field, installation by installation. We need the situation for new renewable generation and power storage to work like this. We need it to be the case that someone who provides storage in the right place at the right time can make money from it. We need it to be the case that someone who makes batteries (or gas storage or gravity storage or turbines or EVs) slightly cheaper or more efficient can make money from that.
There is no reason why this type of progress can work for environmentally damaging tech like fracking and not for environmentally beneficial tech.
Gas isn't a 50 year decision, more like a 20 year decision. It reduces emissions a lot in the short term but leaves the playing field wide open for further rapid and drastic reductions in the longer term.
(A subsidiary concern but still a real one: if you could press a button and replace all fossil fuels with reliable and safe nuclear, you would instantly have catastrophic political breakdown in places where societal cohesion depends on money from fossil fuels. Moving from oil to gas and then ramping down gas progressively allows these places to gradually develop other incomes, and allows the rest of the world time to deal with them and political problems which they are likely to export.)_
> Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels.
The "Cleanest" is around 400g/kwh which is still very far from clean. It is around 20x more emissive that what Nuclear would give you.
But congratulations, you just described what was the German strategy for the previous 20 years. With a lot of pipelines connected directly to Russia (Because Germany does not have Gas) and with a very happy Vladimir.
And then the Ukrain-Russia war came. And the rest is history.
Oh dear... Germany, and Europe, got gas from the USSR since the 70s (go on wikipedia and read about the state of affaires between NATO and the Warsaw Pact back then). Besides having a reliable, save, and cheap source for gas, this agreement kept incentives aligned and communications open. That startegy worked, until Putin decided to say "fuck it, I want Ukraine".
Since the war in Ukraine happened a year ago, and isn't over yet, the rest cannot be history. The problems with green houses gas emissions and enegry are souch older so, with the first measures being taken 20 odd years ago (too little, but better than nothing).
As always, people cry over spilled milk, what happened happened. Now we have a ton of options to deploy, nuclear power is not a feasible one (cost, time...). Organizations active in nuclear power agree, new projects aren't launched anymore. And the last one to be launched are delayed, and come in above cost, when planned cost already wasn't competitive.
Funny so, it took quite a while to reach the point of "Germany bad because gas financed Putin, nuclear power would have prevented that".
I explicity said elswhere that the devloping world is different, didn't I?
In the developed world, read western industrial nations, nuclear is launched anymore. Those legacy projects, Hinkley C or in Finland, run late and cost more than planned. And they a certainly more expensive than solar and wind. Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed. Hence all serious new capacity being either wind or solar. No idea why facta can be so ignored.
By the way, my opinion about the solar industry, makers and sellers of panels, is rather low, so I deffinitely don't cheer those guys up.
> In the developed world, read western industrial nations, nuclear is launched anymore
There is Korea, USA, France, UK, Slovakia and the UAE in the list.
In longer term, you can add Japan, Czeck Republic, Poland (under investigation) and even Italy is considering it right now.
You should certainly said to them that they are not part of your definition of the developed world.
> Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed
Good. The grid worked on good old inflexible based load for a century now and it prooved it works. Lets continue on that and make it low Carbon at the same time.
That being said, the majority are in Asia. The UAE have one under construction, they did install more solar capacity already.
Two Japanese ones are suspended. Which leaves China as the leader.
Just as a reminder: these are the capacities
Under Construction (grid connection, as of Nov. 2023, between 2023 and 2030): 68 GW
Planned: 109 GW
Proposed: 353 GW
Total: 630 GW
Solar capacity installed between 2018 and 2021: 500 GW
Solar capacity estimated to be installed until 2025: 1.3 TW
I hope that puts it into perspective with regards to where the money goes. Nuclear proponents are at risk of becoming a serious road block when it comes to a fast energy transition, even more so if they continue to ignore raw market numbers.
In the UK, planning started on Hinkley Point in 2010. It was supposed to run at 3 TW by 2020, costing £24 per MWh. It's now 13 years into a process that is projected to complete in another 5 years, eventually producing energy for £90 per MWh.
In roughly the same period of time 30 TW of wind capacity have been installed. Even if you discount windfarm capacity at an aggressive 4:1, wind has already succeeded in producing 2.5 times what nuclear said it would be able to and failed at.
Onshore wind is being delivered at a per MWh cost below that of the new nuke, if it ever runs. The offshore cost is much lower still.
Moreover modern gas turbo-alternators can burn hydrogen instead of methane, and electricity generated thanks to renewable units' (wind turbines, solar panels...) overproduction can be used to obtain hydrogen (dubbed 'green hydrogen', thanks to water electrolysis).
If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to maintain something you should always be able to find someone willing to accept market rate (by definition). This separates the cost of maintenance from costs flowing from rent-seeking behavior.
Arguably industry is always willing to pay, in aggregate, the cost for free software to be maintained, but is not willing to pay, despite the optimism of those who sell it, for the marginal utility it gives them per-customer (which should be much higher). When asked to do so they will simply support free-as-in-beer or cheaper alternatives until one of those becomes the dominant player. This is why successful and heavily commercialized free software projects often seem to be only just clinging on to profitability (eg Docker).
>If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to maintain something you should always be able to find someone willing to accept market rate (by definition).
Are you saying that if you can pay someone to develop their proprietary code for a price you can necessarily find someone to accept the same amount of money for the same work but open sourced? That doesn't seem true. Those are not equivalent offers.
No, I am saying that if a project is open sourced, and there is sufficient demand from people willing to pay for support, maintenance, etc, someone will come along to meet that demand.
If there isn't then the original commercial company was obviously never viable either.
Since an entity getting payment for maintenance can neither expect to collect a monopoly rent for the code, nor is required to pay one to anyone else, the cost of maintenance becomes the market price.
I think your view is too strongly assuming that everyone in the market is perfectly rational and perfectly replaceable with zero transaction costs..
Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.
If the code is open sourced, there doesn't need to be a dedicated company behind supporting it. Assuming a compatible license, any party that wants to use can fork it and pay people to maintain it for their own needs without advertising that they "support" the code.
But just because something is open source doesn't mean it's easily maintainable by anyone. It's one thing to install and run it somewhere, but if it needs fixes or customization it quickly becomes necessary to learn and understand the architecture and organization of the code, the data models and structures, etc. and if it was previously the product of a "one man shop" then you're going to have to pay someone to do that learning.
Some products are viable as opensource projects but not as a commercial venture, and the overhead of a business entity might be enough to get out of viability.
Your comment sounds like you think open-source work would be _more_ expensive than closed-source work, or did I misunderstand? That would seem surprising to me.
I would assume some people (clearly a minority) would be willing to take a small pay cut when working on FLOSS.
E.G. could someone be paid slightly less at GitLab versus the same role at GitHub, if they believe in GitLab's principles
There are people who value open source and there are people who value assets. The point is that there isn't a single market rate for the two offers since they aren't the same thing.
While your solution splits the whole thing into smaller and arguably more easily digestible steps, you have introduced two new variables, key1 and key2, which need to be carefully scoped (if they aren't already) so they don't clash with existing variables. If your project consists of many instances of code like this, you end up with many variables which can become harder to manage.
You're also splitting what is intended to be essentially an atomic operation into multiple steps, which can be good if you want to analyze and tweak them in the future, but it's now no longer clear where the process begins and ends in relation to the code that comes before and after: you have to add more comments, or split the whole thing out into its own function.
I'm not saying your code is bad or wrong, just that there are downsides to any solution (including mine), and ultimately everybody has to pick whichever has the fewest negatives for their particular project.
So in other words, Black 4.0 'just a paint' is imperceptible from Vantablack using human vision, and the Anish Kapoor thing was just a publicity stunt?
Looking at it the other way, Black 4.0 reflects 0.05% of the light, and Vantablack 0.035%. So Black 4.0 reflects about 40% more light. The difference is not that small.
On the other hand, Vantablack is highly toxic (similar to asbestos), while Black 4.0 should be quite a lot safer.
Right but 40% of something very small is also very small. If you are experiencing the two blacks in a normal ambient environment around lighting and other non highly light absorbent surfaces, they will look extremely similar.
No, the logarithmic effect bottoms out towards the low part of the scale. If you're somewhere very dark, your eye adjusts so that you get back to the middle of the range. But if you're somewhere light and just looking at black paint, it doesn't.
Having seen his exhibit in Venice. I will say, in the right contexts it really does look like a black hole. This doesn’t require limited lighting, just regular room lighting. 3d objects painted with it will disappear into themselves as if it was 2d.
That model would make sense if you have interesting ideas/culture/tech but are capital constrained. WeWork's problem was the exact opposite - they had an excess of capital and nothing to spend it on except for buying buildings and taking out long-term leases.
your attitude to citations seems strange. Scott Anderson simply says, as part of a rant against anti-EA people, that the EA people said that they bought a castle for the right reasons, and that he chooses to believe them.
What if the mindset of producers were to shift? What if people only worked for free on things that they want to work on? Isn't that both more realistic and better for everyone?